The Worst Birds of 2023
Picking out the best birds of any given year is all well and good, but when reminiscing there are inevitably the bad birding memories that surface along with the good ones. As birders we love our nice little platitudes about how "everyone has different tastes in birds" and "all birds are good birds". On the other hand, I posit that any bird can be a bad bird too in the right context, and some birds are obviously worse than others. Some might still protest that there's no such thing as a bad bird. To which I say, let me be a hater on my blog and go look at House Sparrows or something. More charitably, I don't really dislike any of the birds involved in this (okay, except maybe Ashy-breasted Flycatcher), and I actually considered a couple of them for my "best birds" list. Does going through hell to see a bird make it a very good one or a very bad one? That's a deep philosophical question I don't have an answer to, and since I like compla...